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Detailed Course Information

Spring 2012
Mar 03,2015

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AMER 220 - COMICS AND AMERICAN CULTURE

This course studies the American comic strip and comic book, and will consider these forms in both aesthetic and historical/cultural contexts. The course will attempt to uncover the aesthetic principles of the comics. In this regard, comics will be treated like any artistic work. The course will also consider comics as reflections of the culture which produced them. Since their emergence in the 1930s, comic books have been attacked by educators, librarians, and parents. These public outcries and the comics themselves serve as unique entry points into the American psyche. In the 30s and 40s protesters argued that comics harmed children's eyesight and kept them from "real" literature. In the 1950s, comics were vilified as leading to juvenile delinquency. In the 1960s so called "underground comix" glorified the burgeoning drug culture. The course will look at these comics, as well as the newspaper editorials, senate reports, and psychological studies that followed them. By examining what children were reading and what parents tried to keep children from reading, the course will try to learn something about what America was at these periods and what America wished to be. Comics' emergence as a uniquely American art form is a window into America itself.
0.000 TO 4.000 Credit hours
0.000 TO 4.000 Lecture hours